EXTERNAL INSTRUMENTS – INTERNALLY

Any VST/AU instrument with multiple outputs can be accessed by Live’s Exernal Instrument device. For example, let’s say you want to use NI Battery, but you want one MIDI track to play the kick drum, another track the snare and so on. Or perhaps you want to use SampleTank for several sounds simultaneously, one track playing the bass, another the strings and so on. External Instrument is the most elegant way to implement this.

First, drop your multitimbral, multiple output instrument into a track in Live. In this example, we’ll use Battery. Now, create a new MIDI track, and load up the External Instrument device. In the MIDI To field, you’ll see the Battery track you just created:

Let’s assume that this is going to be the kick drum track. In Battery, we can see that the kick drum cell is programmed to respond to note C1:

…so we’ll know that the MIDI clip in this track should trigger C1. Next we need to make sure that kick drum cell is sending it’s signal to outputs 3/4:

Perfect. We now have two tracks in the Set. One MIDI track is hosting Battery, and a second is triggering the kick drum via the External Instrument device, recieving audio via Battery’s outputs 3/4. Now this same logic can be followed to create several additional tracks for snare and hi hats. These tracks will trigger different notes, and receive on different outputs (5/6 and 7/8 for example).